^ I think that's a fair reading overall. I don't think orientation is coded by styles, tics, behaviors, and so on, but I do think that character designs sometimes reflect the perspectives of designers who at least subliminally believe that and bring that to bear in their art. A more overt but also c...

One thing that struck me in this thread is the way that Ghaleon is possibly designed with homosexual stereotypes in mind. Alunissage cites this dialogue: I GUESS NOW HE'S 'OUT OF THE CLOSET' WORLDWIDE. This may be Working Designs camping up the dialogue, but it feels odd to use the idiom of "co...

A parallel: there's a moment in a novel I won't name when a reckless politician, on a passenger train whose engine has broken down, urges that they be switched to an old coal engine instead of waiting for another diesel engine. He eventually harangues the operator into doing so, even though the olde...

I'm replaying Phantasy Star IV on the Genesis Classics collection for the Switch. The game still holds up for me. The initial scenes with the school principal are a study in doing a lot of character development with little dialogue, and each interparty dialogue since has been thoroughly entertaining...

The only two games on there that I (a) might play and (b) don't have are Wild Arms and Persona, so it's a no go for me. If I ever want to relive my Cool Boarders 2 days, I can hook up my PS2 like anyone else.

I'm playing Dragon Quest XI. I love it so far. It feels as fresh and exciting as DQ8 did, and it's tapping into my inveterate capacity for roaming cities looking for pots to break. Also, while it's early in the story, I'm intrigued by what direction it's going in. I have a few guesses.

I would say any published game (yes, including Dragon Song) definitely qualifies as canon unless one of the developers says otherwise. (Kei Shigema's explanation as paraphrased by Imperial Knight gets at this.) In addition, I would say that the manga and novels may also qualify as canon, as they tel...

There's an article to be written about missing body parts for the sake of overall design or performance. It makes me think of the footless characters in Fire Emblem: Awakening or the faceless NPCs in Persona 5:

1. It's a still from the intro video for Lunar: SSSC. https://youtu.be/71ripBa8Ga8?t=38s . With a reverse image search I found this still from a YouTube video of the Making Of Lunar film: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/r3QtXqTaRos/maxresdefault.jpg We have this version on the Lunar-Net page, which features ...

Much of my gaming time suddenly disappeared for obvious reasons. At least right now I don't have the time for deep sustained dives into games, so I've been playing in shorter spurts: Skyrim, Phantasy Star IV, and Raft have all received some attention.